Tag: sensors

Tunnel Detection

The sensors themselves are a mixture of accelerometers, which pick up vibrations, current detectors, which measure the electrical-resistance of rocks and soil, and subsurface radar. The square kilometer they picked contains more than 100 wells, many underground storage tanks and 10s of kilometers of steel pipeline. Resead made short work of this challenge. It produced an accurate map of the area in just 10 minutes. The system could be useful for detecting tunnels on the Mexican border.

see also the opposite:

The University of Arizona College of Engineering is testing an invisible border monitoring system that could revolutionize the way the US conducts homeland security. The border-monitoring system, known as Helios, consists of laser pulses transmitted through fiber-optic cables buried in the ground that respond to movements on the surface above. A detector at one or both ends of the cable analyzes these responses. Helios is sensitive enough to detect a dog and can discriminate between people, horses and trucks. The system can be set to avoid being triggered by small animals, and can also tell if people are running or walking, or digging, and in which direction. The location of a cut cable, or people, or vehicles, can be pinpointed instantly to within one meter along a section of cable up to 50 kilometers long.

A Fitbit for an Elephant

Understanding energy expenditure can help scientists understand how well animals are doing and whether they are going to be able to hunt, reproduce, and survive. Wilson has used accelerometers to study all sorts of animals including sea turtles, sheep, bats, hawks, and penguins. He combines the accelerometer data with inputs from other sensors that measure temperature, magnetic force, and geolocation to understand exactly what the animal is doing and where it is. The technology allows him to track penguins as they sit on their nests, get up, waddle to the ocean, and dive in. His sensors can stay on the animals for weeks, and after he retrieves the devices, he can follow along as the penguins swim and dive and fish, all from 1000s of km away.

Visual Object Detection

2 Cheap Cameras Can Provide LiDAR-like Object Detection

For most self-driving cars, the data captured by cameras or sensors is analyzed using convolutional neural networks – a kind of machine learning that identifies images by applying filters that recognize patterns associated with them. These convolutional neural networks have been shown to be very good at identifying objects in standard color photographs, but they can distort the 3D information if it’s represented from the front. So when Wang and colleagues switched the representation from a frontal perspective to a point cloud observed from a bird’s-eye view, the accuracy more than tripled.

IBS Belt

Marshall now thinks he’s found a way to diagnose I.B.S. quickly and directly: by listening to it. Marshall described a device that he and colleagues are developing: a wide belt, to be worn by the patient, that records the creaks and undulations of the gut, analyzes them with software, and recognizes the distinct sonic signature of I.B.S.

Dust size cameras

The pill-sized cameras in today’s mobile phones may seem miraculously tiny, given that a decade ago the smallest cameras available for retail sale were the size of a pack of cards. Ali Hajimiri of the California Institute of Technology will make far smaller cameras. His team plan to replace them with truly minuscule devices that spurn every aspect of current photographic technology. Not only do Dr Hajimiri’s cameras have no moving parts, they also lack lenses and mirrors—in other words, they have no conventional optics. That does away with the focal depth required by today’s cameras, enabling the new devices to be flat.

20nm imaging

The technology incorporates several innovations in fluorescence microscopy and super-resolution microscopy and harnesses the same kind of “adaptive optics” technology used in astronomy – deformable mirrors that change shape to compensate for light distortion. In astronomy the deformable mirrors are used to compensate for atmospheric distortion to yield clear images of celestial objects. Deformable mirrors also can be used to counteract the distortion caused when light passes through biological tissue.

Consumer Thermal Imaging

this an awkward implementation, but i welcome the addition of new sensors. being able to find and fix those spots where you’re leaking heat is very empowering.

FLIR Systems launched the FLIR ONE, the first consumer-oriented thermal imaging system for a smartphone.

2015-01-06: Given the embarrassing quality of most houses in the us, a bit of public leak shaming would be great.

Drive-by heat mapping from MIT spinoff Essess can quickly track energy leaks.

Proper HVAC

by collecting 500M data points from the sensors in all their buildings every 24h, finding huge energy savings right away:

In 1 building garage, exhaust fans had been mistakenly left on for a year (to the tune of $66K of wasted energy). Within moments of coming online, the smart buildings solution sniffed out this fault and the problem was corrected.

2016-07-21: Cooling AI

by applying DeepMind’s machine learning to Google data centers, we’ve reduced the energy we use for cooling by up to 40%. In any large scale environment, this would be a huge improvement. Given how sophisticated Google’s data centers are already, it’s a phenomenal step forward.

this is why smart grids are one of the highest ROI investments countries could make.